Some outputs from the SIRikt conference:

This is the official summary report film, including short piece on the work we are doing introducing a framework for social media use in schools at 1.30

https://video.arnes.si/portal/asset.zul?id=lOSXhnXjYKkRYdPMMtALw7Ph

Next up, a film of our presentation session where we outline the five major work-streams and audiences (National Institute, Principals, Schools engage community, Teacher training, Pedagogic approaches in class) in our change programme. Each of these streams is being led by a colleague locally within the organisations taking part as its important that this change is ‘owned and delivered’ by the people and institutions that are affected and will benefit from it.

Each work-stream team leader(s) ran through their objectives, progress to date, and plans for the medium term future:

http://www.sirikt.si/index.php?id=2847

Finally, the web round table that took place in advance of the formal opening where we invited an online audience to discuss and ask us (the panel) questions. Intro in Slovene but turns to English at around 0:30. Myself and colleague and friend Sue Keogh appearing, along with Conor Galvin and Andrej Tomšič, Information Comissioner.

https://vox.arnes.si/p1hvnzhuevc/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Looks like we made the national Slovenian press too. This article in http://www.delo.si was briefly on the front page and takes a look at the project and features an interview with myself:

http://www.delo.si/druzba/panorama/druzbena-omrezja-pri-pouku.html

(you will probably want to Google translate this page!)

I’ll be giving the opening plenary this year:

Social media in education – panacea or passing trend?

Twitter, YouTube and a galaxy of new arrivals in the social media space have transformed the way our social world works forever. With ICT now firmly on the schools agenda and delivering real results in classrooms, is widespread use of social media a natural and beneficial next step? How do we prepare our pupils and teachers to use it safely and in a focussed way? Can it be integrated into a nationally accepted approach to education? What are the key steps in preparing a social media strategy for schools or educational institutes?

I will also be co-chairing two events coving the work we are doing within the DOM – družabna omrežja (social media in education) programme. These are co presented with the programme team as part of the conference tracks themselves:

- DM project (National Project for Social Media Use in Education) workshops – a showcase of progress and outputs to date from the project started back in August 2012.

- The Social Media in Education Web Round Table http://www.sirikt.si/slo/spletna_okrogla_miza.html

And if that isn’t enough Dom for one conference, I shall also be DJing support for the utterly wonderful Manouche, a live Slovenian electro swing combo. True awesomeness right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaM1efQrNXM

Keep tabs on the #sirikt hashtag and watch for more updates!

I remember you were talking about ‘the future of personalisation’ towards the end of the hour. I agree that it is impossible to predict where it is going, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on using social data to personalise a user’s on-site experience?

The future of personalisation is difficult to predict, and I think it is more likely to revolve around individualisation: of experiences, devices, or virtual spaces – which reflect your previous preferences, behaviours and buying patterns. We are already in a world where despite having the same iPhone, yours is different to mine. Due to things like the apps we have downloaded and different accounts each of us set up. Content (whether news or offers from retailers) is going to be increasingly targeted according to your individual activity and organisations wishing to provide a coherent experience will need to do two things:

• Organise their content (product listings, news stories, offers) using a platform that will allow for effective personalisation.

• Become a truly digital organisation – where everyone in the organisation whether they are creating products, dealing with customers, or marketing, are all stakeholders in the digital side of the business and are empowered to take part.

Hello. You spoke early on in the presentation about putting information about yourself on Facebook. I was wondering what your thoughts were on being able to personalise through using someone’s social data?

Social media, in many ways, has set the bar for user’s expectations of an individualised experience. Everyone’s experience of social media is personalised almost by definition (your friends, interests, comments and responses all influence the experience you have). There are ways you can extend the social experience beyond social media and further into the website of your brand: You can do this through targeted advertising and unique ID’s in the link URL which drives traffic to your website. For example, an offer on BMW 3 series cars through a dealership chain with a branch in St Ives, vs one in Bury St Edmunds – according to targeted location based adverts. You can also use likes and invited actions (engagement) as a powerful way for people to identify their preferences and interests via an action on social media that leads to a behaviour on your website that identifies them as one of your personas.

Hello. Why do you think Personalisation is not more widespread?

Up until very recently, personalisation was quite difficult. It involved many stages of understanding business strategy and mapping this to digital, researching and segmenting audiences and creating the experiences and content. Building this workflow into the day-to-day operation of businesses has been a struggle for many. However, platforms like Sitecore offer not only a technology solution for delivering these experiences, but a process through which to define them.

For more on the big issues around personalisation, have a look at this article on Econsultancy. 

How would you rate ‘maturity’?

Sitecore have created an assessment which helps you rate your digital maturity based on current functionality provided. It is called Sitecore’s Customer Experience Digital Maturity Assessment.

The stages include:

• Entry level with simple pages, newsletters and search.

The maturity assessment plots your position and suggests the next features you could consider to increase maturity. There is no one size fits all way of assessing your maturity, this is simply a guide that might generate some relevant ideas for you for planning your service and potentially ‘back-filling’ some areas.

Find out your digital maturity by completing Sitecore’s Customer Experience Digital Maturity Assessment. 

How would you rate digital maturity when you evaluate a business?

Understanding your digital maturity is a crucial early step, alongside defining strategic objectives and measures, in building your wider digital strategy and improving and optimising experiences for your customers. When we evaluate clients’ businesses, we follow a clear process with clients (outlined in our Personalisation White Paper) which includes an exercise to identify which level of digital maturity clients are at (from early stage: static website and bulk send email list, through to fully mature enabled digital business serving dynamically segmented customer groups). We use the Sitecore Digital Maturity Model plus the outputs from BA workshops and discussions with each business to get a more specific insight into the potential that digital can offer. The focus should be on setting the priorities by knowing where you are as a business, digitally, and where your customers are in terms of behaviour and buying cycle.

Is there a software that presents the custom content to the persona? I’m wondering how your service works with an existing site architecture.

Yes. Sitecore can work with your existing architecture and technology. Although, you may find that as part of the personalisation definition process, you gain insights which will lead to you improving the structure of your website for your visitors. Within Sitecore, personas are defined through a set of profile values. These profiles scores are assigned to content and features, as customers interact with your service they are assigned a persona which is then used in personalisation rules to target content.

I’ve seen a few things about ‘big data’ and advanced profiling based on your day-to-day online use… what’s the future of personalisation?

The big issues with ‘big data’ is being able to find meaning in it all. No use in just measuring everything if you can’t recognise what is going on. This is why it is so important to set your strategic objectives first. What is your business trying to achieve? What do these achievements look like (higher sales, greater registrations, engagement from a younger demographic, for example)? Then you can look for indicators of these specific behaviours in the big data. People are getting lost in it all, the key is to be clear on what you are looking for!

How have you seen Personalisation developed on B2B sites?

Yes, absolutely. We have tended to focus on B2C in this space due to the volumes of data available and more public case studies. However we believe the boundaries between B2B and B2C digital services are very blurred, non-existent even. All buying decisions, whether B2B or B2C are still made by people. If you can create an experience that makes your visitor feel understood, empathised with and given good service then they are more likely to buy and more likely to recommend you. Whether they are buying paper supplies for their business or a skiing holiday for their family, the approach is the same.

Do you think there is such a thing as too much Personalisation? For example Amazon offers me 8 sections of personalised content on the Homepage alone. Can you bombard customers too much with Personalised content?

Yes we do, in some cases. We don’t want to pigeonhole people or create a personalisation bubble. Serendipitous journeys and out-of-character impulse buying will, and should, remain so. We need to allow for human experiences. When used too much, personlaisation can seem invasive and overwhelming. It can result in being a huge overhead in terms of generating content (in some cases). Again, the key is relevance to your audience… what two or three things do they really need to have made personalised for them to buy? If you understand your customers, this answer will emerge.

There also seems to be talk of personalised online video in 2013 – can you share any thoughts on this?

Yes, video seems to be a real talking point in some quarters. Although, I think that the secret to success with video is understanding that it is another form of content, and it is important to know where and how to use it. Videos can be very powerful as a way of introducing ideas or teasing for products, but also it is often used by companies and consumers as a way of providing much deeper more detailed information – check out the tutorial videos created by Apple fans for examples of these. Once you understand what your customers or visitors are trying to achieve, through research and persona development, you can decide much more accurately what is the best way to use rich media, like video, to meet their needs. Also, it is important to remember that YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine and thus is an important platform to consider when thinking about your ‘findability’ and SEO strategy. YouTube is not just one-way though, it is increasingly a conversation – with customers who are responding to, advocating, mimicking, and criticising products. As with social media, once logged in, YouTube is a personalised experience your video content can play a part in that experience.

Very good presentation. Personalisation is a given these days to ensure you create long term customer value. However, the references tend to be focused at larger established companies, but you can see that SMEs would benefit from this as well to gain traction from a revenue perspective, but also to minimise speculative marketing costs which stops lots of businesses from committing to a proper marketing spend. Can you comment?

Thank You! The Natural World Safaris example is an SME who have taken advantage of Sitecore’s primary licensing to start using personalisation at a relatively low cost. We agree that this should not be in the realms of big organisations only, if anything the opposite as more agile organisations can quickly deploy and change their campaign rules.

What sales improvements have sites that have enabled personalisation seen?

This varies quite considerably and there is no one answer. Many people expect to see a 15-20%+ improvement on campaigns but that’s a very general guide. There are some very impressive case studies showing percentage improvements in the 10’s or even 100’s. The email marketing world also has some impressive case studies, worth reviewing as they’re more mature in personalising content.

The key content is taken from the Personalisation Whitepaper from 2012. Check out the recorded video of the webinar using this link http://bit.ly/11jJ8Tz

More details:

Personalization works – every consumer wants to know the organization they choose is listening to their requirements, and adapting to their individual needs. We can all remember examples of personal service, where an organization listened and responded well, where we were treated like an individual.

Consumers increasingly want personalized service through digital channels as well, but the personal service benchmark still remains offline in call centers or through direct customer contact with staff. Many brands see this as the next challenge, recent reports show that just 11% of brands believe that they are achieving some level of personalization online, but just under two thirds of brands want to move ahead with personalization within the next two years.

Post webinar Q&A session outputs can be found here.

Big thanks to support from Sitecore, Customer Engagement Network, and all the contributors who helped, plus the great teams at SparkInteractive and ClerksWell.

You can download the 2012 Digital Customer Engagement Report here. DEC_Survey2012_online.pdf

Summary and ‘Six Lessons’:

With organisations increasingly turning to digital channels to deliver marketing, engagement and customer service, we have focused 2012’s report on the whole customer experience, and the role that digital is playing in a competitive and challenging marketplace. Complete with an array of insightful commentaries from leading figures across the world of digital marketing, organisational change and specific audience sectors, it is a not to be missed opportunity to grow your understanding of the ‘state of digital’ in 2012. In advance of the official release date, we thought we would share a few key insights from the report:

1 – Make things personal

The report points to a significant increase in interest in providing content experiences for visitors to your website. We know that companies like easyJet have seen increases of 20% in conversions since utilising the personalisation functionality of Sitecore.

2 – Automate your online marketing response

The research shows that companies are seeing huge potential in automating marketing responses through digital channels but many are unsure of how to most effectively implement this.

3 – Analytics are collected, but poorly understood and acted upon

Many companies, while collecting data on user behaviours and conversion data, are still struggling to build effective frameworks for turning insight into action. How are you tackling this issue?

4 – Blockers still exist

Despite the fact that digital is now embedded across many aspects of the organisation and a lead route to market and enduring effective customer relationships, there are still significant hurdles to full digital maturity. The three top blockers are:

1. Sufficient resources, time and resulting understanding to ensure digital is most effectively used
2. Investment in and effective reporting of analytics enabling a complete view of the customer journey
3. A lack of robust framework for sharing successes and lessons learned across particularly large enterprises. Digital is still seen as a silo or department, when it is increasingly a feature of every line of business.

5 – Investment continues to grow

Driving customer engagement and building this single customer view is a top priority for smart successful organisations. In 2012-13 the key investment areas are:

1. Email campaign management and marketing automation
2. Development of company wide personalised content managed experiences for customers
3. Social marketing strategy and insight

Here are a couple of pictures from my chairing of the Social Media & Customer Service track at the 2012 Summit at the Victoria Plaza at the end of November. Spark Interactive launched the 2012 Digital Customer Experience Report at the conference. You can download yours here: DEC_Survey2012_online.pdf

(Even though they say so themselves), it was a brilliant day:

With close on 350 delegates in attendance and a speaker line up to die for the Customer Engagement Network’s first ever Customer Engagement Summit is being hailed as the best customer event this year – and indeed for many years.

Of course content is king at events such as these and with case study presentations including the likes of First Direct,  British Gas, giffgaff, Experian, Premier Inn, EE, Twitter, John Lewis, Lloyds Banking Group, Shop Direct Group, Unilever, Sony, Diageo and LV=  then there was plenty for delegates to get their teeth into.

A packed programme kicked off in typically thought- provoking style with an excellent opening keynote from behavioural economist Roger Martin-Fagg , recognised as a global leader in his field – and finished with an inspirational closing keynote from Dr Nicola Millard, BT futurologist, with an update on her ground breaking Autonomous Customer research examining the changing behaviours of ‘smart’ customers operating in an omnichannel environment.

There were many highlights in between in a Summit with 38 speakers in all  – and streams ranging from Mobile Engagement to Social Media Engagement to Employee and Customer Engagement to Omnichannel Engagement and those focussing on Retail, Financial Services and the public sector.

‘Get Geared up for Personalisation: Creating the Perfect First Impression’ provides a detailed strategic and practical framework for identifying and realising your approach to creating personalised experiences for your web site visitors.

Created by one of the UK’s first digital customer engagement departments set up within a digital agency, this guide is aimed at the digital marketer or marketing team within organisations who are looking to improve their customer’s experience online, specifically:

• Define what the ‘perfect digital customer experience’ should be for your online presence
• Identify the key stages in your customer’s online journey
• Develop practical and evolving user personas
• Automate and act at every touchpoint (both onsite and across the social space)
• Create an actionable approach to measuring success

Calling upon the expertise of experienced digital strategists and marketers, including practical advice from Sitecore themselves, this free white paper is a peice of knowledge you don’t want to miss.

Get yours here: Sitecore_whitepaper (1) (1)

Whitepaper blurb:

cScape and leading CMS vendor Sitecore have teamed up to publish a new white paper into the exciting emerging world of web site personalisation.

‘Get Geared up for Personalisation: Creating the Perfect First Impression’ provides a detailed strategic yet practical framework for identifying and realising your approach to creating personalised experiences for your web site visitors.

Created by one of the UK’s first digital customer engagement departments set up within a digital agency, this guide is aimed at the digital marketer or marketing team within organisations who are looking to improve their customer’s experience online, specifically:

• Define what the ‘perfect digital customer experience’ should be for your online presence
• Identify the key stages in your customer’s online journey
• Develop practical and evolving user personas
• Automate and act at every touchpoint (both onsite and across the social space)
• Create an actionable approach to measuring success

Calling upon the expertise of experienced digital strategists and marketers, including practical advice from Sitecore themselves, this free white paper is a peice of knowledge you don’t want to miss.

You can access the white paper itself here.

We were doing this via phone and listening now I would suggest you turn the sound down… I’m rather shouty…

Access the recorded webinar here.

At this month’s Forum, we were treated to the wisdom and experience of a wide range of commentators and experts from across the fields of e-commerce, high street retail, industry analysis, and review and reputation management. The speakers included representatives from Henley Business School, Gallup, Screwfix, Confirmit, Reevoo, Planet Retail, Marks and Spencer and the Local Data Company.

June’s key learnings were:

The retail market has changed, and perhaps found a ‘new normal’ We will all have noticed how the high street has changed in the past few years, with vacancy rates for retail space running stable at 15% since the end of 2010, an increase of over 10% since 2008.  Interestingly this isnt getting any worse, 15% seems to a a ‘new normal’ as key retailers move out of town or increasingly online. According to data from the Local Data Company this shows a change in the way our town centres will be used in the future, with the average age of the big spender increasing, companies like John Lewis are gaining from more transient fashionable retailers. Their data also shows that 75% of all retail space is now lies out of town, and with 50% of all retail leases due to expire by 2015, how will this ‘great clearout’ change our high street and how we use town centres in the next decade?

In an ‘onmi-channel’ world, customer effort is as important as customer satisfaction. How easy do we make it to do business with us? You will be aware of the waiting time frustration of call centres, of course: but what about experience of unboxing, or making a complaint, or downgrading your account. In the world where reputation is increasingly defined by the social space, we have to think very carefully about how we treat our customers across all touchpoints. Work done at Henley Business School strongly suggests that customer effort is more of a driver of loyalty than customer satisfaction or promoter indications. Brands like Apple and Metro Bank at the forefront of defining new experiences for customers, where they are focusing on using customer’s names, understanding context, and being more ‘human’ at key points… lowering both physical and ‘emotional’ effort.

Core to making this successful is an understanding of the context of each touchpoint and what this might mean for your customer as an individual. It’s worth noting that that the transactional activity will heavily influence the tolerance a user has of effort – an example would be a mortgage application against a change of address for your bank – customers will expect something as important as a mortgage application to take a few calls backwards and forwards (as long as each has value), but something like a change of address or balance enquiry should be a simple self service affair.

The science of emotion plays a critical role in customer decision making, and it seems it is at last being recognised. The ‘new rules’ of customer engagement described by Gallup used HBR’s Human Sigma model of understanding how decision making is affected much less by rational thought as we might choose to think.  This extends into the way we make management decisions in the corporate world too, with some commentators even suggesting that the drop in interest in behavioural sciences in the 1970’s and 80s could be a contributing factor behind a lacking in understanding in the decision making which lead to the banking crisis in 2007.

The term ‘omni-channel’ is important as it reflects that users want the same experience no matter what the channel is, and not necessarily a different experience according to channel. While versioning the content experience is important – to ensure its appropriate for location, context, screen size, etc – the qualities the experience offers should be consistent. If you are known for quality personalised service, how will that manifest when they contact you via a mobile website? This concept of customer effort is being explored at Henley Business School, with a white paper due out later this year. Smart companies are ensuring their CRM, call-centre and digital marketing systems are integrated to to best deliver consistency across channels.

The power of social was also highlighted through the effect or customer reviews on purchasing decisions. Revoo explained to us that reviews and recommendations from your customers is rapidly becoming a ‘can’t ignore’ issue. According to Fly Research 95% of people read reviews before making some or all purchases and more interestingly, those seeking out bad reviews on your products could be your best prospects, as they are exploring why they shouldnt buy… which is a very good indicator that they might. Also, as founder Richard Anson explained, 70% of shoppers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad reviews, and a product with only good scores are suspected by 9/10 people as being fake or censored.

This new transparency extends to pricing as well, as Planet Retail explained: Customers with a new focus on value are interested in not only the best offer, but also how prices are calculated against their competitors. Smart retailers are using the web to engage with shoppers on many levels with Starbucks, Walmart and Tesco all recruiting shoppers online to help develop products, choose what’s in store and recommend to friends.

This new ‘openness’ works in bricks and mortar stores as well. Several high street stores in the UK offer free wifi to shoppers and do not discourage price comparison with online retailers. If they know this is a common behaviour (particularly for high street electrical and whitegoods) they are starting to realise that its better for the customer to make that decision when in store, and they can be shown all the value added they get from buying in store (delivery, face to face service, after sales, etc).

If you are local, use it as a competitive advantage. Retail headlines seem to focus on the trend busting growth of Amazon, who have shown growth of 35% in the last year and have got it right in terms of choice, delivery logistics and price, it seems.  Of course, retailers of all kinds can learn something from e-commerce giant, but to compete on their terms is a dangerous game., better to know your value in your locality – local knowledge, face to face and a memory for your customers – so shouldn’t lose their unique approach and ‘personality’. Make a visit special and memorable. Convenience stores have seen great success by focusing back into their local communities, and brands have been supporting this with local community initiatives such as ‘transform your patch’.

Another aspect of the marketing decisions you need to make refer to how you want your brand to be perceived, as explained by Jo Moran from Marks and Spencer. More channels mean more resources spread more thinly, so be careful of the expectations you set. You also need to match customer experience with employee empowerment to drive human interactions in the social space. Screwfix found that when they relaxed the rules around their customer contact centres and store touch points, and allowed people to reflect their personality more, they found a significant rise in satisfaction. Simple clear rules on governance which were developed in partnership with staff at grassroots rather than as dictat from management, ensures that your front line have the tools they need to provide consistent service while having the ability to make sensible decisions themselves on behalf of your company. This has been one of the most talked about issues across this space for some time.

Podcasts to follow shortly.